I’ve been wavering on whether or not to blog about stuff un-related to work. Scoble’s post inspired me, though, to think about when it makes sense to voice personal opinions. What would I have expected of any American with a public venue in...

Courtesy of Nick Hodapp , here's a great example of using Managed C++ to quickly and easily make existing C++ functionality available to .NET apps. It's a short and sweet sample, but I like it because it shows how easy it is to write a .NET class...

Robert Hess tells me the next episode of The .NET Show on MSDN will cover WinFS. He's interested in feedback on what topics you'd like to see covered. His guests will be: Mike Deem , Quentin Clark , and Anil Nori . What would you ask these guys...

While responding to an earlier comment, I came across a nice write-up from Mike Gunderloy of Microsoft's recent decision to license the XML schemas used by Office 2003 apps. There was a lot of news coverage when the Office team filed patents to cover...

Haven't yet seen one person in favor of easter eggs, and in fact Tom points out that Microsoft's own book on security best practices proscribes avoiding easter eggs. So I'm willing to be swayed by the masses (or at least the few of you who posted comments...

Tom says there's no excuse for adding easter eggs . I think this post of mine has generated more activity than anything I've written about WinFS or Longhorn ;) I'm not going to advocate that every developer ought be able to spend as much time as they...

Sharing Whidbey interim releases more frequently (Mark Cliggett, via JayBaz , via Scoble ) with our developer community is a great step for MS, I think. I love to see the Whidbey team being more open and engaged with the community On the other hand...

What do you do when you want to innovate on top of 1.4M lines of 20-year old C code? Code so ancient that your Chief Architect describes it as “so crufty and esoteric that we couldn't even understand it sufficiently in a single release cycle”...

Remember back when Microsoft apps had cool easter eggs ? Easter eggs were always a fun way for the development team to leave their mark on history. Maybe your favorite feature got cut, but hey, your name was there in lights for all to see! Leading...

For my second not-bad WinFS scenario , I’m going to again avoid anything that requires a bunch of new work entering or editing meta-data. We’ll get to those eventually, but I want to emphasize that WinFS can be useful without requiring the...

Before going on to my next scenario, I wanted to address feedback I’ve gotten so far. On the general usefulness of WinFS, Stephane Rodriquez commented that “It's not about information, it's about MESSAGE.” You can quibble with...

Turns out my evangelism cohorts Dave Massy and Karsten Januszewski are back into the blogging world. I suppose it's worth mentioning a bit about how the Longhorn Evangelism team is structured. We're a pretty small group, only six of us total on the...

For my first not-bad WinFS scenario , I wanted to pick something simple. No big behavior shifts to start adding new metadata, no huge rewriting of applications, etc. I settled on adding background music to home movies. I’ve been editing together...

Trying to address the continuing complaints about too much Longhorn blogging and not enough “what can I do today?” blogging: It looks like there will be some pretty good content at this year's DevDays (Feb 23rd through Mar 24 at various locations...

That was a long post back there, so here are my quick high level points countering the notion of meta-crap, which I hope to demonstrate with some scenarios over the next couple days: 1) meta-data on a local, individual scale is interesting enough ...

What better motivation to get back into blogging than a challenge from fellow Microsoftie Dare: “ The WinFS folks and Longhorn evangelists will probably keep focusing on what I have termed “bad scenarios” because they demo well...

Here’s a chance for developers in the Bay Area to hear about Microsoft’s efforts to provide more opportunities for ISVs and solution providers. Mark is General Manager of a team in my organization that is focused more on creating value and...